Tiny Core vs. Puppy vs. Crunchbang - Which is the best lightweight Linux distro?

[TeamRocket1233c]

Hey there! After reading some stuff on Tiny Core, Puppy, and Crunchbang, I'm a little curious as to what you guys think.

Which of the three lightweight distros is the best, Tiny Core, Puppy, or Crunchbang?

Thanks!

[jjex22]

If you want an install to function as a normal distro, but lightweight - crunchbang; being based on ubuntu, there's little comparison - great package support, very stable, and truly small YMMV, but mine is 112MB ram booted, seldom exceeds 300mb on my machine doing the usual's. I personally use it as a host platform for testing OS's in VMWare and VirtualBox because of it's small footprint.

Puppy is a great tool, and it can be really good for speeding up pc's if you open and close applications a lot, or read a lot from disk, because it loads completely into ram. It's also great for netbooks and portables, because of this feature (it doesnt, by default write to the disk until you shut down) as it gives even longer battery life by reducing HDD read/writes. Puppy I also very useful for making edits - it can unmount all partitions and swapoff - I use it to stay online whilst creating a HDD image, and for my netbook on long train journeys!

The puppy 5.x versions also containg Ubuntu code to support .deb packages, though I must warn you adding packages is often where puppy falls down - whilst crunchbang is just a case of add the dependancies, it really isn't a rare occasion where applications fail to install properly under puppy (under Wary I've had quite a few issues with Chrome.) I don't recommend Puppy myself for a full time distro - for one there's no user account or sudo, so you're running as root - which can be dangerous. You are also missing a lot of tools -(at the end of the day it's less than 400MB - well under a 10th of Crunchbang.

I've personally not used Tiny Core in about a year - not tested the current release, but I see it more of a tool than an OS, it's just too small for anything other than specific tasks IMHO. I have a lot of respect for it - a bit like quirky puppy - a realy achievement of how small you can go; but at a price.

Those are just my personal experiences with them, yours may vary, but I'd recommend Cruchbang for daily OSing, Puppy as a tool that also lets you keep working whilst using it (and as a travel OS), But tiny core, in my expereince is a case of look in aww... but it's not really meant to be a desktop OS - so it depends on your needs.

[TeamRocket1233c]

Cool. I've been somewhat considering lightweight distros in general as although full-blown distros like Debian, Ubuntu, or Fedora are great on modern hardware, a lightweight distro such as Crunchbang or Puppy would be snappier and use less resources.

That and also, the current Crunchbang's based on Debian so you can use the Debian repositories with no problem in it, whereas Lucid Puppy 5.2.8's Ubuntu-based, which means you can probably use the Ubuntu repositories in it.

Also, Tiny Core would probably perform best on netbooks as it uses the least resources of the three distros, as its ISO's only 10 megs in size, whereas Puppy's is 128 megs in size and the current Crunchbang ISO's 512 megs.

Plus Tiny Core looks kinda like a stripped-down OSX in a way.

You can also probably set Tiny Core up how you want it if you do a LOT of hacking... And both Tiny Core and Puppy would be great travel OSes as you could set up a flash drive with them and have plenty of disk space left over on the particular Linux drive you set up using those two distros.

And Tiny Core would be best for setting up in a beginner's virtual machine due to its size.

So in other words, Debian, Ubuntu and its variants, or Fedora: best for desktop usage as desktops are generally more powerful than laptops, whereas Crunchbang: better for laptops as you can still have a half-decent desktop on a laptop with no problem. Now Puppy and Tiny Core: best for netbooks as they can have a relatively easy to use desktop, with Puppy's desktop boasting a Windows 95/98/2000 look and feel, and Tiny Core's having a dumbed-down OSX look and feel. That and they use the least resources of any currently supported distro, and with netbooks, ease of use and low resource usage is everything.

In addition, for setting up a Linux drive, 32-gig or 64-gig is a safe size to go for, whether you're using a lightweight distro or a full-size one.

[jjex22]

If you like the idea of an OSX style dock, you can add them to pretty much any DE nowadays - they don't all need compositing either, so their footprint isn't huge.

This guide is for openbox - so crunchbang.

At the end of the day, you can set up any linux to do whatever you want really - puppy even allows you to create 'pupplets' from it. You can most definitely get tinycore up to a stable, full use light distro - but I warn you it can be a lot of work. If you liked the idea of creating a custom system exsactly to your needs, I'd also say take a look at gentoo - It was my second ever distro after Fedora Cambridge, and I learnt a hell of a lot building it - you wont get it as tny as tinycore - nothing really is- but then I can't see the advantage of being that small - there's just too much missing for my needs. It is worth baring in mind you almost instantly get a low resource distro just by changing your DE to something like flux/openbox or LXDE/Enlightenment if you like it less minimal.

[TeamRocket1233c]

[IWantFroyo]

CrunchBang is my favorite, but it doesn't really count as a lightweight distro. I would put it at a 'medium'. It's still Debian, and it has Flash and other things. It's still lighter than most distros, though.

My vote for the lightest distro, since I haven't used PL in a long time and never bothered with TC, goes to Arch. As long as you don't install anything graphical, your computer will fly.

[|{urse]

Out of the 3 for a desktop I'd say crunchbang. All the reason why I did not choose puppy or tinycore were already listed above by someone else.

[TeamRocket1233c]

Coolios! Might go ahead and go with Debian for a full-blown distro, because I really like the GNOME that it ships with, having used it before in Ubuntu 9, and Crunchbang for a lightweight distro for running on either full-fledged laptops or desktops, Puppy for a netbook distro, and Tiny Core for a USB flash drive distro.

[wolfen69]

Insightful.

Tiny Core, I think is good for tinkerers and specific needs users.

Puppy is great for very low spec pc's and thumbdrives/recovery tool.

Crunchbang is a more full service distro with a minimal interface.

That's the end of my in-depth review.

[LinuxFan999]

Another option is to do a minimal install of Ubuntu, then install a lightweight Desktop Environment, like LXDE or IceWM. If you don't want to do very much tweaking, Crunchbang and Puppy are good options to.